It is a surprise, no doubt. On the other hand, bash scripts can contain data and be far larger than available RAM, so just slurping the whole thing up at the s

It is a surprise, no doubt. On the other hand, bash scripts can contain data and be far larger than available RAM, so just slurping the whole thing up at the start doesn't really work. That's also true of executables, but bash scrips aren't exec'ed, they are just text files that are read in by the bash executable.